Simple Machines Forum (SMF)

[Cedric]

Do we have any SMF forum admins here?

I'm amazed at the recent development and progress they have made. They really seem to have made much progress in responsive design too.

 

[Kale]

I've used SMF as an admin and a mod before. I know way back I didn't care for it much, but now it seems like it is turning heads.

 

[Cory]

I probably have, but to be honest, I don't even recall using SMF as an average user.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

I used to be a heavy user of it at one time.

I ran Another Admin Forum on it for most of the life of the forum.

SMF isn't a bad software. They seem to be the only free forum that is doing fairly major upgrades.

But once I went to XF, that was it for me. It just has the kind of features I'm looking for.

 

[Arantor]

It's kind of sad to me how long it took to get to 2.1 - I remember building the alerts system and adding likes in 2013...

I did ask them back at the start of the year if they had a roadmap, on the basis that I'd be willing to contribute any features from StoryBB (which is a fork of SMF) back to SMF if they were on the roadmap, but after 6 months of asking I shrugged and gave up. Haven't been back to their forum since.

It's even a running joke in their Discord now about whether there's going to be a roadmap. I'm not being funny but if you can't produce a bullet-point list of 'what the next version should be' in 6 months, I don't know what to say.

That said, I look at phpBB and MyBB and wonder what they have for the future. The free world seems to be in some limbo place

 

[simonweb]

Wait, is SMF still around? Huh, I thought that was a dead forum project. Because I've NEVER seen or used an SMF forum. I see that they now have a responsive theme at least, that's good I guess, but the overall feeling of SMF is still that it's a discussion board that's stuck in the very early 2000's.

 

[Shortie]

I have used SMF as a user and an admin myself in the past but I have not gone back to it since so I have not seen any of the changes they have made, to be honest. It has got me curious now though and I am keen to see and know what they have done to the software. I remember when I used to use it and admin with it, I tolerated it but I was never keen on it.

 

[Arantor]

So the big things in 2.1 which came out in February 2022:

* alerts system
* new less janky editor
* ability to embed attachments in posts
* post drafts
* responsive theme
* likes
* mentions

There's also a bunch of behind the scenes stuff like a background tasks system for one-off jobs (like XF's deferred jobs)

It's not perfect but it's more than usable. And yes, XF and IPS have had these for years... but I'd hoped for a release in, say, 2015 when I was dev team in 2013-14... (I built more than one item off that list.)

But I realised how frustrated I was with the team's inability to decide anything when after a bunch of 'how do rename child boards to sub-boards because our members are confused', we had a multipage argument on whether we should do this. And I was just... I'm sorry, I can't be doing with that, if you're going to police even the tiniest decisions... either you let the dev team do the dev, or you don't. Pick one.

Even my little corner of the world - roleplay based forum software - is SMF based, though it's gone through a lot of changes with more to come.

 

[Naiwen]

I have used it before personally and I love it.

 

[Aaron]

I've been playing around with SMF over the past couple of days but there is a very limited amount of plugins available for it's newer version and none of the old plugins are compatible.

 

[Arantor]

Well, most of the folks who wrote 2.0 mods left in the 11 years between 2.0 and 2.1.

That said, most 2.0 mods will work on 2.1 with minor changes for the most part, if people can be encouraged to actually look at them.

 

[Aaron]

Well, most of the folks who wrote 2.0 mods left in the 11 years between 2.0 and 2.1.

That said, most 2.0 mods will work on 2.1 with minor changes for the most part, if people can be encouraged to actually look at them.

I guess there's some setting that will overright the error on the admin cp stating that the version isn't compatible? I haven't really looked.

 

[Arantor]

You can even override it from the admin panel, that's been a thing since 2.0 to be able to override the version check. See the section at the bottom called Emulation Support, which is basically 'when you go to find install instructions, look for <this version> rather than whatever version the site really is'. This was very important in latter parts of 2.0 when mod authors set instructions for '2.0, 2.0.1' and it was like 2.0.4 (and mod authors hadn't discovered that they could specify 2.0.* as a wildcard)

 

[Aaron]

You can even override it from the admin panel, that's been a thing since 2.0 to be able to override the version check. See the section at the bottom called Emulation Support, which is basically 'when you go to find install instructions, look for <this version> rather than whatever version the site really is'. This was very important in latter parts of 2.0 when mod authors set instructions for '2.0, 2.0.1' and it was like 2.0.4 (and mod authors hadn't discovered that they could specify 2.0.* as a wildcard)

Oh I'll check it out. Thanks for letting me know.

 

[Aaron]

You can even override it from the admin panel, that's been a thing since 2.0 to be able to override the version check. See the section at the bottom called Emulation Support, which is basically 'when you go to find install instructions, look for <this version> rather than whatever version the site really is'. This was very important in latter parts of 2.0 when mod authors set instructions for '2.0, 2.0.1' and it was like 2.0.4 (and mod authors hadn't discovered that they could specify 2.0.* as a wildcard)

Hi when I try to install a SMF 2.0 Mod I get this error (Is this normal?):

Error in package installation
At least one error was encountered during a test installation of this package.
It is strongly recommended that you do not continue with installation unless you know what you are doing, and have made a backup very recently.

This error may be caused by a conflict between the package you're trying to install and another package you have already installed, an error in the package, a package which requires another package that you have not installed yet, or a package designed for another version of SMF.

 

[Arantor]

This can be normal. This is 'the plugin wants to find some code and replace it with some other code' and it couldn't find the code it looked for. This can be 'mod needs an update' but can also be 'mod doesn't play nicely with another mod you already have'.

Every plugin on SMF has its own thread, chances are someone has talked about it there.

 

[Ravenfreak]

SMF is my favorite free forum software. I know it took them quite a long time to go from 2.0 to 2.1, but I like it better than other free forum software. Their default theme and layout for 2.1 looks way better than the competition, and it's pretty easy to navigate through the ACP.